Born in 1902, María Izquierdo became one of Mexico’s most accomplished female artists of the 20th century, with a career similar to Frida Kahlo’s. Both became famous for their canvas paintings, rather than murals, which was Mexico’s defining artistic expression at the time. While Kahlo’s notable relationship was with Diego Rivera, Izquierdo’s was with Rufino Tamayo, both men known for painting on canvas and walls.
In 1945, Izquierdo was offered the opportunity to paint a large mural in Mexico City’s government headquarters, potentially making her the first female Mexican artist to undertake such a public commission. However, the offer was rescinded, and Izquierdo passed away in 1955 without ever creating a similar mural.
Izquierdo is also known for her damning quote: “It is a crime to be born a woman, it’s an even greater crime to be born a woman with talent.” The statement hints at the suspected reasons behind the cancellation of her proposed mural. Some believe that Diego Rivera, David Alfaro Siqueiros, and José Clemente Orozco—Mexico’s three most prominent muralists—led a boycott against her. Izquierdo’s sketches for the mural, depicting Mexico City’s history from its Indigenous roots to its post-Industrial Revolution social ideals, almost exclusively featured women. Despite previous collaborations with female artists, like the U.S.-born sisters Marion and Grace Greenwood, the male muralists disapproved of this concept and dismissed Izquierdo as “incapable and inexperienced,” resulting in the mural’s cancellation.
In 2021, curator Dea López sought to revive Izquierdo’s project on an exterior wall in the city of Oaxaca. On March 8th (International Women’s Day), 110 volunteers—mostly women—gathered to recreate the sketch at large scale, with a few variations. While Izquierdo’s original concept included a few men, this new version exclusively featured female characters, to affirm its feminist intentions. Over the course of four days, they completed their work, which now prominently displays its title: “El Mural Que Debió Ser” (The Mural That Should Have Been).
As someone who has spent his life in the noble profession of teaching, I had exactly the same thought as Paul Krugman about the genesis of yesterday’s very special episode of America: Fuck Around and Find Out:
So what do we know about how the Trumpists arrived at their tariff plan? Trump claimed that the tariff rates imposed on different countries reflected their policies, but James Surowiecki soon noted that the tariffs applied to each country appeared to be derived from a crude formula based on the U.S. trade deficit with that country. Trump officials denied this, while at the same time the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative released a note confirming Surowiecki’s guess. Here’s their explanation:
Ignore the Greek letters, which cancel each other out. This says that the assumed level of a country’s protectionism is equal to its trade surplus with America divided by its exports to America.
Trump also set minimum tariffs of 10 percent on everyone, which means among other things imposing tariffs on uninhabited islands.
There’s so much wrong with this approach that it’s hard to know where to start. But one easy thing to point out is that the Trump calculation only considers trade in goods, while ignoring trade in services. This is a big omission. Notably, the European Union runs a substantial surplus with us if you only look at trade in goods — but this is largely offset by an EU deficit in services trade:
So if Trump’s people had plugged all trade with the EU, not just trade in physical goods, into their formula they would have concluded that Europe is hardly protectionist at all.
Where is this stuff coming from? One of these days we’ll probably get the full story, but it looks to me like something thrown together by a junior staffer with only a couple of hours’ notice. That USTR note, in particular, reads like something written by a student who hasn’t done the reading and is trying to bullshit their way through an exam.
That’s a bingo!
Krugman is a lot smarter than I am, but I also recognized that this is pretty much exactly what must have happened, as soon as I read the details of the administration’s “analysis.”
The boy who would never do his homework is going to wreck the world’s economy, and give us all a bracing little interlude of FAFO, because of sheer intellectual laziness, and the malignant stupidity that is its inbred cousin:
When the fate of the world economy is on the line, the malignant stupidity of the policy process is arguably as important as the policies themselves. How can anyone, whether they’re businesspeople or foreign governments, trust anything coming out of an administration that behaves like this?
Next thing you’ll be telling me that Trump’s people are planning military actions over insecure channels and accidentally sharing those plans with journalists. Oh, wait.
I’d like to imagine that Trump will admit that he messed up, cancel the whole thing, and start over. But he won’t, because that would spoil the dominance display. Ignorant irresponsibility is part of the message.
Me: I don’t get it. I thought I was doing a lot better than I was a few years ago. I’m like 10 times more on top of things than I used to be. How does everything feel terrible now?
The Tiny Me in OSHA-approved Hi-Vis Gear Who lives in my brain and pulls all the levers: Boss, it’s the fascism. You’re completely gunked up with cortisol due to the fact that your entire daily life is now underscored with a haunting awareness of the rapid erosion of your rights, dignity, and any and all social safety nets, and you’re also bearing witness to the most vulnerable people immediately being persecuted. This creates a natural stress response that basically means you’re going to continue having memory and organizational problems, as well as emotional imbalances.
Me: BUT I HAVE A BULLET JOURNAL AND I MEDITATE NOW.
Senator Cory Booker just broke the all-time record for the longest Senate floor speech, speaking for over 24 hours without a pause (no food, no bathroom breaks, only water to drink) as a protest against Trump and Musk and what they’re doing.
The previous record was set in 1957, when Strom Thurmond spoke for 24 hours and 18 minutes protesting the Civil Rights Act.
Senator Booker has blown past that record, currently at 25 hours and still speaking as of 8 pm local time. Respect.
“Conjugated nouns,” offered by Ohio State University linguist Arnold M. Zwicky in Verbatim in 1975:
I steal the keel. I stole the coal. I have stolen the colon.
They choose the hues. They chose the hose. They have chosen the hosen.
They mow the banks of the row. They mowed the banks of the road. They have mown the banks of the Rhone.
I do it with the buoys. I did it with the biddies. I have done it with the bunnies.
I tear the hair; I tore the whore; I have torn the horn.
I see the sea; I saw the saw; I have seen the scene.
I draw the law; I drew the loo; I have drawn the lawn.
I throw the bow; I threw the boo; I have thrown the bone.
I sink the mink; I sank the manque; I have sunk the monk.
I choose the booze; I chose the bows; I have chosen the bosun.
I weave the leaves; I wove the loaves; I have woven the love-ins.
I forsake the cake; I forsook the cook; I have forsaken the whole mess.
Philip M. Cohen added, “I scare for the mare; I score for the more; I have scorn for the morn.”
Born in 1921 in Fenzhou, Shanxi, China, Pye was the son of missionaries. His father died in China in 1926, but his mother stayed until the mid-30s, when it was time for Pye to attend high school. They moved to Oberlin, Ohio for that. He went to Carleton College, graduating in 1943. He then joined the military, being assigned as an intelligence officer for the Marines back in China. After being mustered out, he went to Yale to work on his Ph.D. in political science, which he achieved in 1951. Not surprisingly, he became a sinologist, writing his dissertation on warlord politics in the 20s.
Pye was a pretty ambitious guy, but he chose perhaps an odd place to base himself–MIT. Obviously one of the greatest schools, but for political science? Well, he made it pretty great in that field. He would teach there for the next 35 years. He became a critically important scholar on comparative politics in Asia, with particular interests in modernization theory. He was particularly uninterested in quantitive studies, understanding that numbers do not explain human behavior. He was pretty blunt about this stuff, which of course warms my deeply qualitative heart. As his daughter lated explained about his father’s ideas: “Political scientists are all failed novelists…..academics shared with artists the impulse to tell a story, but that statistics, studies and even firsthand fact-finding alone made an incomplete picture.” Preach it.
Pye also took on the McCarthyite era of political science. He pushed to make the field more receptive to the developing world and to actively study local cultures, though he could certainly overgeneralize through his interest in behavioral ideas. In some ways, Pye was part anthropologist. He pushed the field of political science away from overarching theories. Good. Overarching theories always obscure more than they elucidate and that includes Marxism. In fact, one of Pye’s goals was to find alternatives to Marxism. He founded the Committee on Comparatives Politics within the Social Science Research Council to explore alternatives.
I think I will take a moment here to expound on this a bit. I have long believed that we need a post-Marxist left. What we actually have now is a left that doesn’t read anything, so maybe we sort of have that, but the reality is that among people on the left who do read, it’s still Marxism and it’s held onto like a religion. The problem with this is that all religion is bullshit and you can convince yourself that someone holds The Truth if you want to, but you are doing that because you want to and not because it is The Truth. The thing about what Pye was doing though–and I am not really criticizing him for this–is trying to create a liberal alternative. But liberalism also has very sharp limitations and nowhere was that more clear than in the Cold War, when enormous crimes against humanity that challenged those of communism or fascism were handwaved away. Some of that almost becomes a secular religion in its own right defining itself against those nasty leftists. So…I don’t know, it becomes hard to advocate for specific ideas of social change against two groups of people who are in part defined by hating each other without subscribing to either side. I guess this is why the left internet hates me and why my interactions with deeply held liberals on this site are…..problematic.
A good Democrat, Pye became an important advisor on Chinese matters to Democrats, including John F. Kennedy and Scoop Jackson. He was certainly a hawk of the JFK-LBJ school, very much supporting the Vietnam War in its early years. Communism had to be stopped I guess. But he also moved toward supporting normalization of relations with Beijing and was head of the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations for a time, including the period when the American table tennis team visiting China in 1971, a seemingly minor but important moment.
Anyway, Pye did all sorts of work in southeast Asia. He studied the appeal of communism in Malaysia. That led to 1956’s Guerrilla Communism In Malaya, Its Social And Political Meaning. He worked with the Social Sciences Research Council to establish important institutes in Hong Kong. He researched in Burma. He strongly opposed the Hamlet program in South Vietnam, the beginning of him questioning the war. The Hamlet program was so stupid–nothing will gain the hearts and minds like forcing them from their homes and basically putting them in concentration camps! He certainly never opposed the war exactly; he was an aggressive foreign policy guy at heart. But he certainly recognized it was a disaster in fact and was ambivalent upon American withdrawal and North Vietnam taking Saigon in 1975. He was a big proponent of psychology and especially Freudianism, which he tried to apply to a study of Mao that I am sure does not hold up today in any way, shape, or form. But it was the times.
Now, I don’t know much about Pye’s wife Mary, but I assume she was also a political scientist or similar academic with professional training like so many wives of male academics in these years. I say that because in 1985, he published a book that actually had his wife’s name on it. That was Asian Power and Politics: The Cultural Dimensions of Authority. I am sure that his wife did a huge amount of work on the previous books too. I do know that they met back at Carleton and had been together basically forever by this time. Now, this was not so well received, in part because the kind of broad generalizations about peoples that Pye had specialized in earlier in his career when such things were respectable were becoming more problematic by the 80s. He was accused of trafficking in stereotypes in this book, which I am sure is true, though I have no reason to read this book. His last major book was The Mandarin And The Cadre: China’s Political Cultures, from 1988.
Pye died in 2008. He was 86 years old.
Lucian Pye is buried in Mount Auburn Cemetery, Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Pye was president of the American Political Science Association in 1988-89. If you would like this series to visit other APSA presidents, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. Kenneth Waltz is in Cape Rosier, Maine and Aaron Wildavsky is in Lafayette, California. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.
He was particularly uninterested in quantitive studies, understanding that numbers do not explain human behavior. He was pretty blunt about this stuff, which of course warms my deeply qualitative heart. As his daughter lated explained about his father’s ideas: “Political scientists are all failed novelists…..academics shared with artists the impulse to tell a story, but that statistics, studies and even firsthand fact-finding alone made an incomplete picture.” Preach it.
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